Saturday, March 15, 2008

Open-Source Terrorism

I love the internet, it's a great way for people to be able to communicate and for others to remain informed of what is happening. Probably thanks to the internet things like the second world war will never be able to happen again.

Recently I've been seeing these articles about a "group" called Anonymous. And it got me thinking. Who would want to call themselves anonymous leave no traces and just destroy the lives of others "for fun" what fun. The last person I knew who thought that was fun was in Germany and that was in the 1940s.

Well back to my headline. What is this anonymous thing? is it really some sort of organized on-line terrorist group? Or is it just open-source terrorism. I.e. anyone who wants to vandalize something in cyberspace just signs Anonymous and gives the idea that this was some sort of organized activity?

I think it is the latter.

It's so easy now to just create havoc, mess people's lives and assign it to some ambiguous group "anonymous". Some poor student sitting at home being bored can go in hack a computer, crash a window or whatever and sign it anonymous.

Meanwhile a few merchants of chaos can sell the idea, instigate the hate, propagandize the idea a la Goebbles and tell everyone that they are operating off some group called "anonymous".

Well, the bottom line is free speech doesn't mean free messing up of people's lives. And the internet is about free speech not free destruction.